Locke Fell Down and Broke His Crown

John fetches a pail of water and then walks like an Egyptian in the hieroglyph-covered Orchid. Smokey plays fetch with some French folks. Charlotte’s not allowed to have chocolate before dinner. Desmond shows up uninvited to Ben’s party – awkward. Christian gives Locke a D-minus in “follows instructions.” Sun puts the gun down reluctantly. Jin apparently took a crash Berlitz English class while floating in the ocean. Daniel’s been stalking Charlotte for decades. Rousseau develops some serious issues with men. And Ben does his best road trip-dad impression with an: “I will turn this car around right now!” Yet another all-killer, no filler episode of Lost last night!

Lost 5x05: This Place Is Death

In Los Angeles:
Sun gets a call from her mother and the unbearably cute Ji Yeon. She wants to know when Sun is coming back. Sun replies, “I’ll be on a plane tomorrow.” That she will, though it’s not the plane she thought it would be, I’m sure. She hangs up and leaves Aaron in the car to confront Ben.

Sun has her gun sights on Ben for causing Jin’s death. But he drops the ‘Jin’s alive’ bombshell on her and can prove it. He’s got Jin’s wedding band. She agrees to let him take her to someone who can prove it. Kate and Sayid fume off and it seems the plan is falling apart. Sun and Jack are discussing and Ben has a hissy fit, stops the van and says everything he’s done has been to keep them and their friends safe. (It will be quite the mindf--- if it’s revealed at the end of this that Ben actually is a good guy.)

Ben, Jack and Sun arrive at a church to meet the woman who can prove Jin’s alive. At the same exact moment, Desmond pulls up! Made for some nice drama. Ben looks freaked out. (Question: Is this because he knows Widmore sent him or because he wasn’t expecting Des there? Or did he not know that Daniel is Faraday’s son?)

They enter the church and – not-so-big reveal – the lady they’re both there to see is Mrs. Hawking. (The use of the filmed-from-the-back-or-in-the-shadows-and-reveal surprise is getting a bit overdone on Lost, no? Michael, Christian, Mrs. Hawking, Jin, etc…)

Somehow, despite her decree of “God help us all” if Ben didn’t get all of the Oceanic Six to the church in 70 hours, Hawking says, “I suppose it’ll have to do for now. Let’s get started.” Not sure where on the 70-hour timeline they are, but perhaps they have more time to convince Kate (with Aaron), Sayid and Hurley to come along too.

On the island:
Danielle and crew talk to Jin, who says he needs to look for the camp and the helicopter. ‘Planes, helicopters…Next it’ll be a submarine’, Montand jokes. Danielle says that they sailed from Tahiti and that it’s November 15, 1988. Robert, Danielle’s baby daddy, is listening to the radio broadcast with the numbers (4-8-15-16-23-42) that has been broadcasting and asks Jin if he knows if there’s a radio antenna on the island. Jin says yes and then they convince him to take them to the tower before he looks for the camp. They set off and immediately Nadine goes missing. They hear the clickety clack of the smoke monster and they’re looking for Nadine when Smokey crashes up through the ground and Nadine comes crashing down from above – dead. They run and Montand is scanned (?) and then caught by Smokey and dragged. The crew and Jin chase after him and grab hold of him as he’s about to be pulled into the ground. (This is just like the scene when Locke was almost pulled under by Smokey in Season 1.) Just as it seems they might snag him back, Montand’s arm is torn off and the rest of him goes down the hole. Gnarly!

The hole is in front of the Orchid station. The building is covered in hieroglyphics, similar to those on the countdown clock in the Swan station and below the Orchid when Ben went into the frozen donkey wheel room.


Geek alert:


They hear Montand call out for help, saying the monster is gone. Jin warns them not to go, but Robert, Brennan and Lacombe go down the hole. Jin convinces Danielle not to go for the safety of the baby. And suddenly the sky turns purple and Jin is in the future with the decayed arm in front of the temple still.

It’s the near future and Jin makes his way back to the beach, sees Brennan and Lacombe dead, and hears Rousseau and Robert fighting. They are fighting about the monster. Robert says it’s a security system for the temple. Danielle says he’s sick and changed. But he charms her and says he doesn’t want anything bad to happen to her or their baby and he tries to take a shot at her. Too bad…no ammo. Rousseau hits him right between the eyes. Did it seem to anyone else that Robert had been brainwashed or maybe replaced with a new Robert, like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers pod person?

Geek alert: The music box Jin finds is Rousseau’s which Sayid later fixed in Rousseau’s hideout when he was held captive in 2004.


Geek alert: Why did Rousseau’s team need explosives?






Jin steps out and Rousseau accuses him of having the sickness too. He runs into the jungle and the island skips again. Jin shows up back in the present and runs into Sawyer, Locke, Juliet and the rest of that group. It’s an “awwwww” moment when Sawyer and Jin hug. They set off again together for the Orchid and the island flashes numerous times. Charlotte’s near death and Daniel stays behind to help her. She tells Daniel that she was born on the island and lived there until she moved away at 16 with her mother to England. She was also warned by an old man not to go back to the island – and she thinks that man was Daniel. (So much for him not altering the past, huh? Though it seems the universe course corrected and killed her anyway.) More flashes, more nosebleeds, Charlotte dies. The reaction to her hasn’t been overwhelmingly positive, but I will miss her. It is interesting that she’s a person of science and died. More on that later.

At the Orchid Station:
They make it to the station and Juliet remarks, “what are the odds we’d end up in the same time as this thing.” And then Sawyer called her out for jinxing them as time jumped again and the station disappeared. (Question: In such close proximity to the station, shouldn’t some piece of it have remained when they jumped, like their clothes, their backpacks, the canoe, etc.?)

They go to look for the well that Charlotte had tipped them onto and find it. Like Alice in Wonderland, Locke decides to go down the well in a scene reminiscent of John going into the hatch in season two. Sawyer says they should lower him, Locke asks, “Where would be the fun in that?” Time flashes, light emanates from the bottom of the well, Locke goes plummeting down the well and Sawyer is left playing tug of war with several tons of topsoil.

John fell down and broke his crown…er…leg. Locke’s got some revolting bone protrusion when someone walks up, lights a lantern and reveals (again with the secret reveal) himself as Christian Shephard. He’s tells John he’s there to guide him. He also chides John for not having been the one to move the island as he told him to in Jacob’s cabin. He has to do it, but Christian can’t help him. (Seems to me this is because Christian is an appartition and not physically there.) Christian tells John he has to go to Los Angeles and look for Mrs. Hawking to help get the others back to the island. John says that Richard said he was going to have to die, and Christian says “that’s why they call it sacrifice.”

Locke manages to hobble up and into the frozen donkey wheel room. The wheel is skipping around, seemingly the cause for the island’s frequent jumping. John manages to push the wheel and Christian looks on approvingly.

“Say hi to my son,” says Christian. Of course time flashes right before he can say who his son is…

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Question: Locke & Faraday are the only ones who don’t have bloody noses yet. Why not them?

Half-baked theory: My brother brought this up, so credit to Phil. But it’s interesting that Charlotte, a woman of science, died. Could this mean that it all comes back to faith. There’s quite a possible religious parallel:

• Jacob is God. Christian is Jacob? Or at least a messenger for Him?
• John Locke is Jesus – the son of God who has to sacrifice himself to save the world
• Ben represents Lucifer or Satan, the fallen angel who was cast down from Heaven, the island.

We'll see...

Killer episode last night. It really propelled the storytelling ahead. What did you think? Comment, debunk, debate.